About MarCom Professional

MarCom Professional is a social professional network. What’s that? You’ll know what a social network is… well-known examples include MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Social networks link people together based on some common cause or reason; to have fun and make friends, establish new business contacts, share photos.  We define a social professional network as a specific type of social network pivoting around the members’ career; marketing communications in this instance.

All members of MarCom Professional work in marketing communications, or write about it, or teach it or are training to work in it. The obvious central topic of conversation is, need we say, marketing communications.  There are no geographic boundaries, no style police and just a few rules (our Terms and Conditions including our Code of Conduct). Everything is professionally hosted, safe and secure; and membership is free.

MarCom Professional encompasses:

  • Advertising
  • Analyst Relations
  • Branding
  • Communities/Social Networks
  • Content
  • CSR
  • Digital Media Marketing
  • Digital Media Relations
  • Direct Marketing
  • Events and Shows
  • Graphic Design
  • Measurement & Analysis
  • Packaging
  • Product Placement
  • Promotion
  • Public Affairs
  • Public Relations
  • Publicity
  • SEO/SEM
  • Sponsorship
  • Website/New Media

A marcom professional seeks to establish dialogue and forge a relationship with potential customers, stakeholders and all influencers of importance to their client or employer.  The rise and rise of social networks, and the associated blogosphere, is therefore critical to the marcom skillset. What better way to discuss this and all marketing communication matters, what better way for the marcom community to come together, than on the marcom social professional network.

In short, you can do just about anything you like. Whilst we have tried to anticipate the kind of features you might find useful, we’ve also left it as open as possible to allow you to make of this what you will. One thing you will notice is that MarCom Professional is a hybrid of blogging and wiki… combining the advantages of both into what some call a bliki.  It’s all very easy to use.

Here are 16 ideas to get you started:

  1. Start your own community (eg, Birmingham PRs, sports marketing, Syracuse graduates, wine club, pro-bono / volunteering, youth marketing)
  2. Use MarCom Professional as your agency’s intranet by starting a community restricted to your work colleagues
  3. Collaborate securely with your colleagues and peers to write articles, copy, press releases, etc.
  4. Keep your own personal blog
  5. Read what others have to say and respond if you feel like it
  6. Post audio and video podcasts
  7. Network by arranging meet-ups for your community (although we don’t publish members’ contact details)
  8. Stay in touch with university alumni and ex-colleagues as you move through your career
  9. Create and maintain a page about your organization
  10. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite sections of MarCom Professional so you never miss a beat
  11. Create an alter ego to add polemic or commentary you might not want to post under your real name
  12. Discover other members you share a lot in common with
  13. Post about your favorite restaurants and venues from a marketing communications perspective (eg, for client meetings and events)
  14. Easily invite your Marcom colleagues and associates to join by accessing your webmail address book (eg, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!), your local address book (eg, Outlook) or your LinkedIn account
  15. Make remote working and freelancing a little less lonely!  Stay in touch with colleagues throughout the day, throughout the week
  16. Contribute to the development of MarCom Professional.

We provide specially designed buttons to link to MarCom Professional from your personal blog, homepage, or social networking profile. Please see our blog buttons page for more info.

Note that MarCom Professional is not for headhunters. Recruitment agencies and recruitment consultants may not become members. Moreover, members’ contact details are not published and are therefore not available to other members.

MarCom Professional is designed and hosted by a small independent company called Social Professional set up to do just this sort of thing. We’re all BIG Web fans and we decided to do this whilst kicking ourselves for not doing Facebook :-). Saying that we wanted to create a more cohesive social network, one where all members have more in common than they do on generic networks.